An AWESOME Summer
by The WGPM
Summary: Even when Candace and Stacy are five, Phineas and Ferb are but one, and Perry hasn't hatched yet, there's always a redhead and their quiet friend doing all they can to seize the day! Meanwhile, Doofenshmirtz is busy as usual, but without Perry the Platypus to stop him, who knows what will happen? Set ten years before the events of the show.


**So, this is going to be different from everything else I wrote... It's an idea I had ever since the first time I watched the "Save Summer" special when Candace says that she had "an AWESOME summer," hence the title, but that she "couldn't do everything [she] wanted." So, that's where my take on the classic before-the-canon story came from.**

**Speaking of the canon, ****I do not own Phineas and Ferb.**

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><p>Neither Phineas, Ferb, nor Candace remember that summer. After all, what is a summer really, but a tepid month or three? Despite this, those three tepid months did happen - exactly ten years ago. That was when Phineas said his first word (Ferb's wasn't for another few years); it was when Lawrence and Ferb moved to America; it was when Candace first encountered the Mysterious Force; it was the summer where everything changed, and if the siblings could have remembered life back then, they would all agree that it had been for the better.<p>

Now, if you had to guess, what would you suppose Phineas's very first audible word was? Maybe something inspirational, like if he (for whatever reason) meant to say, 'car' and then 'deed' but it came out as 'Carpe Diem'? Or maybe something too terribly cute, like 'cookie' or 'Perry'? Or perhaps a combination of the two, like 'I love you'? (In a family way, guys. Come on.)

Well, wrong on all three accounts. In fact, Perry wasn't even alive yet back then, so that guess was next to impossible.

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><p><em>There's only 100 more days of summer vacation<br>Before we go to school for the first time_  
><em>So the little kid problem all across the nation<em>  
><em>Is seizing the day before bedtime;<em>

_Like, maybe:_

_Building a treehouse_  
><em>Or fighting a caterpillar<em>  
><em>Pretending to have superpowers<em>  
><em>Discovering that something doesn't exist<em>  
>(While holding a piece of paper saying, 'Unicorns aren't real!') Candace: Gasp!<br>_Or giving your beagle a shower!_

_Exploring dark caves_  
><em>Designing chic hairdos<em>  
><em>Or playing football in the rain<br>_Candace: Touchdown!  
><em>Inventing a new word<br>Having sleepovers_  
><em>Or driving my brothers insane!<em>

_As you may know, there's a whole lot of stuff to do before school starts to call_  
>Candace: Come here, Bucky!<br>_So stick with us, 'cause Candace and Stacy just wanna do it all!  
><em>_So stick with us, 'cause Candace and Stacy just wanna do it all!_

Linda: Candace! What did I tell you about making a title sequence?  
>Candace: (*shrugs*)<br>Stacy: (*plays guitar!*)

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><p>It was just like every other day that summer. A five-year-old Candace woke up before the alarm clock, raced through her ablutions, ran downstairs, and waited ever so patiently outside the front door to her house. "Sthacy," she called with the voice she had yet to perfect. Watching for the van with her best friend in it to come into sight from the left side of the street, she continued, "Sthacy?" A few seconds passed. "Sthaaaacyyy," sang the girl, "Sthacy."<p>

And that was generally how Candace spent the next fifteen minutes, by which time the name ceased to sound like a word. Eventually, Candace gave up and turned to head back inside where it was nice and cool, but stopped as soon as she heard grains of gravel being crushed under the moving tires of the Hiranos' van.

The poor Japanese girl could hardly make it out of the vehicle before becoming squashed in a giant bear hug from Candace. "Ooh, Sthacy you're here!" The redhead exclaimed happily, "I've waited seven fowevas fow you and WOAH we're falling!" In her enthusiasm, Candace had picked her friend up, but the sudden extra weight on Candace's feet had caused them both to collapse on the ground, giggling.

"Come on, let's go inside!" Candace called; Stacy silently followed her best friend in the house, which was as familiar to her as her own. "Mommy, can we take Phineath and Fehb outside to pway?" The boys' sister asked.

Linda sighed, then grinned, and allowed, "Yes, just be careful! They're very young, so don't play rough."

"We won't!" Candace promised happily. She scooped up her biological brother, who protested at first but eventually gave in, and Stacy picked up Ferb to take him outside.

Linda watched from the other side of the sliding glass door as the girls set Phineas and Ferb on the grass and started talking about all there was to be done; well, only one of them really spoke. "What do you want to do, Sthacy?" Candace asked, "I know! We can make a slide, like a weally weally big one! Then we can slide down it, and we can take my bwothers, too! It'll be tho fun. Oh, we can make it up in the twee to get down fwom our tweehouse!"

Stacy crossed her arms, closed her eyes, and shook her head. She walked up to the tree and pointed up, showing how, given the dimensions of the house, it was physically impossible to install another exit that way. "Okay," Candace started, "How about we, uh, build a wollacoasta? That would be fun, too!" Stacy looked at her flatly. "Yeah, that might be too hard, even for us, and it might be too scawy for Phineath and Fehb! Let's wait until we're bigger to do that. Hey, where's Bucky?"

Stacy scanned the yard for the dog, finally spotting him on the side of the house. The girl pointed, and soon they had both run up to the beagle with all the supplies they needed. "Sthacy, I know what we're gonna do today!" Candace exclaimed, "We're going to give Bucky a makeover!"

The dog's ears perked up and he raised his head curiously, and if you didn't know better you'd have thought that he knew he was in trouble.

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><p>"This isn't evil," Dr. Doofenshmirtz told himself, "But it's-it's for the better, right?"<p>

"Who are you talking to?" Asked a soft voice from behind him.

"Nothing!" Heinz declared, turning around sharply, "Oh, Vanessa. You gave your daddy a scare! I'm, uh, just working on a little project of mine that I've wanted to make for a while now... Nothing really important."

"What kind of project?" Vanessa inquired, curious.

"Oh, it's a very important project. I'm thinking of calling it a Personality-Correct-Inator. So, behold! The Personality-Correct-Inator! It's not finished yet, but I'm going to have a lot of fun with it when it is."

"So it's a toy?"

"No, honey, it's not a toy," Doofenshmirtz told his six-year-old daughter. "It can be very dangerous, so don't touch it, okay? Listen, you can't tell anyone, but I think Mommy is having... Some problems, okay? She seems a little less happy around here, and I want to make her more comfortable. She was really glad to be around before, but now, I just don't know. I suspect that she's been exposed to some kind of attitude-changing chemicals or something. Anyway, all this is so unlike her, so I figure, if I can, why not change her back? Hence the Personality-Correct-Inator."

"Is it evil?" Vanessa asked, not comprehending the word she had grown to dislike.

Dr. Doofenshmirtz sighed. "No, this one's not that evil. I'm doing this for Mommy, remember."

"Can I have one?"

_This is going to be a long day_, the girl's father thought.

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><p>"Tho, how are we going to do his hair? There's not much of it," Candace observed. "I know! Let's put a bow in it. But what color bow..? What do you think, Phineath and Fehb?"<p>

The boys had paid no attention to their sister's question. Phineas was sitting in the grass, his arms folded and his legs tucked in, pouting for some reason. Ferb simply laid on his back, playing with his feet and swatting at the occasional butterfly.

Stacy extracted a yellow bow from a place behind her back.

"Okay!" Candace agreed, accepting the accessory and attaching it to the beagle's coat. "Ooh, he lookth tho pwetty!" Candace giggled. Bucky had gotten exactly what the girls had promised - a makeover - complete with obscene amounts of blush, poorly applied eyeliner, and mascara (which ended up outlining his ears, for lack of knowledge and instruction on Candace and Stacy's parts). They tried to put lipstick on him, but he kept trying to eat it so the girls put that away. Any chance the poor creature could get, he would have taken off running. "Don't you think he's pwetty, Phineath and Fehb?"

Phineas just grunted, and turned away. Candace dismissed this act and averted her attention to Ferb, who was now happily rediscovering the existence of his tongue. Stacy was more curious as to why Phineas was acting the way he was. She approached the boy carefully.

"Phineas, what's wrong?" She asked quietly, "Do you want to play with me and Candace?" The boy simply shook his head at this. "Do you want to play with Bucky?" She asked, and to her surprise, Phineas nodded stubbornly.

"But, Phineath, Bucky's _my_ pet," Candace protested, "Me and Sthacy were playing with him, not you."

Phineas angrily tried to crawl over to the dog, but with little success. This added to the frustration he already felt when his sister refused to let him play with the dog, and so he did what every reasonable toddler would do in that situation. He started crying. Loud.

Like, _really loud!_

This caught the attention of the boy's mother, who looked up from her potpourri and rushed outside to see the damage. "Candace and Stacy, what's going on out here? Why is Phineas bawling again?"

Seeing this as an opportunity to escape, Bucky stood up and trotted inside the house, whimpering. "And what is-! Candace and Stacy, what did you do to the dog!?"

"We gave him a makeover!" Candace gleefully explained, "Isn't he pwetty?"

Linda pinched the bridge of her nose. "What am I going to do with you girls?" She asked, "You just can't get enough, can you?"

"Of making the betht day ever?" Candace started, "Nope."

"That's it," Linda scolded, "Every day, you do something irresponsible, and every day Phineas ends up crying, and I have to put you in time-out. Do you know how that makes me feel?"

"As if you're stuck in a mundane routine that you can't get out of?" Candace guessed.

"No, it makes me feel sad; angry, sometimes. Now, I want you to come inside."

The girls started towards the house, their heads hanging. "_With_ the boys," Linda insisted, and Candace and Stacy turned back to pick up Phineas and Ferb, respectively.

And it was at that moment, in Candace's arms, when Phineas finally uttered his first real word. "Busted!" He insisted, "You're _busted_."

* * *

><p>Vanessa sat upright on the couch at the sound of the start of a familiar commercial. "Daddy, Daddy, I want that!" She said, pointing to the Mary McGuffin doll on the television screen, "I want - Daddy?"<p>

The little girl peeked over the edge of the couch, facing the empty room. An idea struck her, and she skipped towards the completed Personality-Correct-Inator, which had been faced off of the balcony for the moment. "Wow, this looks funny," she marveled, "I want a turn!"

Vanessa brought a stool up to the machine, climbed onto it, and started to fiddle with its controls. "It's not evil, what's the worst that could happen?" She reasoned. She put her eye up to the aiming mechanism, observing, "It looks like a telescope! Cool!"

Once the viewing area came into focus, Vanessa saw two people whom she sometimes hung out with when their mothers got together or when they had invited her to what they called a 'Big Idea.' She thought these two were as good of a target as any. "Alright," she started, aiming for Candace, "Have some personality-correctination! You, too, quiet girl!" She laughed, and fired at the two friends.

* * *

><p>Candace, holding Phineas, and Stacy, holding Ferb, stopped right in their tracks. They had just felt like something important had just happened, and were wondering what it was.<p>

"I feel different," Candace admitted, "Do you feel different?"

"Maybe it's just the weather," Stacy guessed. "But suddenly, I want to do something relaxing, like go shopping."

"Shopping?" Candace asked, "Why would you want to go shopping when there are little bwothers to bust?"

The two stood in silence for a few seconds, holding the boy with whom they had swapped personalities. "Somehow, this feels correct," Stacy said.

"Yes," Candace agreed after a moment's hesitation. "Yes, it does."

* * *

><p>"I wonder what this button does!" Vanessa said, gesturing to a red, circular key with a long word on it. "It's not evil, so what's the worst that could happen?"<p>

Curiosity getting to the six-year-old, Vanessa pressed her finger to the button and waited with a hopeful smile to see what would happen. Two seconds later, the entire machine, along with the stool Vanessa was sitting on, popped out of existence. "Woah," she cried, "I wanna do that again!"

Before she could move, the door behind her opened and her parents walked in. Her father was clearly nervous, and Charlene did not look impressed. "So, to make you feel better, I made you this," Heinz explained, gesturing towards the area previously inhabited by the Personality-Correct-Inator.

Vanessa turned and waved innocently to her parents, and Charlene sighed. "I _know_ we have a daughter, Heinz," she started, "Now, can I get back to my potpourri? Linda and I are having a competition."

After Charlene left, Heinz bowed his head in defeat. "The -Inator disappeared _again_?" He pouted, "This is why I'll never get a nemesis."

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><p><strong>41/16: Nice, good to know your time machines are working! Your url is ****9IFeIn**

**For your next clue, go to the story that is also published on inkitt.**


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